We parked by the house, Linda said there was no point going in, there was nothing for us, I said we might as well take a peek while we were here.
We got out of the car and walked around the corner.
Christ, this is the one, I thought.
Two houses stood at right angles to each other, like a little L. There was also a third house, much smaller than the other two. Between the houses was a large well-established garden. It had to be at least fifty years old. In some places it was completely overgrown, but it was beautiful and perfect for the children as it had a variety of nooks and crannies that were connected in a labyrinthine way.
“What do you think?” I said, looking at Linda.
“It’s lovely,” she said.
“I think it’s brilliant,” I said. “Shall we buy it?”
“Maybe,” she said. The slightly indifferent tone to her voice had more to do with her mental state than the house, I thought. John left his water pistol in the garden and that was a sign we’d have to go back. I arranged a viewing with the real estate agent and two days later we were there again. We said we would give it some thought. We drove home, were there for a couple of days, and then we flew to Norway and stayed with my mother for two weeks, and by then Linda was on the upswing, toward a lightness and joy, she talked a lot, laughed a lot, had lots of ideas and great energy, and it was fine, it wasn’t too much.
I called the real estate agent and put in a bid for the house. There was a bidding round, I didn’t give a damn about the money, I wanted the house, and two days later it was ours. We would take it over in October.
* * *
Earlier that summer Mom’s cousin Hallstein had called her to ask if I would do a reading at an event they were having, I’d said yes because I had imagined a kind of book day in the old dairy that was now an art museum opposite Mom’s house, with an audience of maybe sixty or seventy. The villages around Lake Jølstravannet were small and more than twenty kilometers from Førde, the center of the district, which was no great size either.
The day before the reading arrived, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but hours before it was supposed to begin cars started parking outside. When I put on my shoes, walked around the house and crossed the road with the book in my hand, I ran straight into a large gathering of journalists and photographers. I was greeted by TV cameras and flashes. They had been waiting for me.
“What have you spent all the money on?” one asked.
“I’ve bought a washing machine, a tumble dryer, a dishwasher, and a TV,” I said.
Hallstein shook my hand and led me in. The room was packed.
“Do I have time for a cigarette?” I said.
“Of course,” he said.
The journalists flocked around me again. More questions. Behind them came Mom, Linda, and the children crossing the road. They stood at a distance watching what was going on. The children were wide-eyed. Heidi thought I was going to sing, she said. Verdens Gang took a photo of the kids without me seeing and printed it in the paper the following day. I called Elisabeth and asked if they were allowed to do that. I couldn’t do anything myself because I had written about other people and so I no longer had any rights as far as my own life was concerned. I could accept this, but I didn’t like it. Elisabeth called back, she had spoken to Verdens Gang, they had promised never to use the photo again. Mom had bought the papers, wanting to see what they said, and Vanja caught sight of the photo of herself, she was angry, she looked ugly with glasses on, she said. You’re the prettiest girl in the world, I said, but to no avail, her eyes narrowed and didn’t light up until all thoughts of newspapers and TV dissolved in the real world down on the little beach where they swam in the water on their inflatable dolphins.
The previous evening I had done the reading and talked a little about my relationship with Jølster, where I’d written parts of all my books and which also came up in everything I’d written. While I was talking I saw Vanja standing at the back looking at me. Hallstein asked a few questions, then I signed books and walked back across the road where those members of my mother’s family who were there had gathered.
It had been absurd, I had been there every summer for nigh on twenty years and no one had ever been interested in what I wrote or said, and then all of a sudden the place was bristling with cameras the second I crossed the road.
* * *
Linda and I drove up into the mountains the next day to spend the night in a cabin. The river in the middle of the valley, the mountains on either side, the white peaks under the gray sky, the water that was perhaps three kilometers away. Not a soul around, just Linda and me sitting at the table outside the cabin, the dense forest stretching upward, spruce and fir trees.
I told her about the summer before I started at the Writing Academy, when I had been in that very place for a week on my own trying to write. I told her this was where Grandpa had courted Grandma for the first time. The sun set, we sat outside the cabin chatting in the dusk, surrounded by the faint roar of the waterfall high up in the forest.
Linda had been captivated by the nature in Vestland from the first moment she ever saw it and had almost fainted at the beauty of the fjords and mountains; she had been visiting my mother to produce a radio program about the seventeenth of May. She talked about it now. They had seen porpoises in the fjord, that had been a good sign according to Mom, and they had seen deer in the forest, that had been a good sign, too. She had been pregnant with Vanja then, but hadn’t known. Anfinn, who was married to Grandma’s sister Alvdis, was the son of a horse dealer and as compact and powerful as a bear, and he had told her about the time when he went hunting whales and had shown her all sorts of weird and wonderful objects he had kept from those days. We had visited them every summer since, they’d been at both Vanja’s and John’s christenings, but that winter Anfinn had died. It was their cabin we were borrowing. I told Linda about another of Grandma’s sisters, Borghild, also dead now, who had known all there was to know about everyone in the family, both those who were alive now and those who weren’t. And how Tore and I had written a screenplay here and we had gone down to visit Borghild, and she stared at Tore through a magnifying glass, which made her eye enormous.
It was precisely this countryside I had described in A Time for Everything and where I had set the story of Cain and Abel and Noah. The mountains before Ålhus in Jølster and Sørbøvåg by Mount Lihesten in Ytre Sogn. My maternal grandparents were in it, and Linda’s mother and Linda and Yngve and I, however all with biblical names I had taken from a family tree and no longer remembered.
I had known this landscape for as long as I could remember, but it had never been mine, I had never belonged here. Perhaps because I demanded too much from what it meant to belong. I didn’t feel I belonged to Kristiansand either and although I related to the countryside on the island of Tromøya, I never felt I had the right to call it my own, we were newcomers. And I had missed that all my life, coming from one place, belonging to a place, being able to call a place home. Geir used to say the definition of home was a place where no one could deny you access. And then we used to discuss whether “Hell is home” or “Home is hell.” Connecting home with a landscape and not a state of mind was my most reactionary feature, but it was also the most deeply rooted.
* * *
The following day we drove into the valley behind Mom’s house with the kids, parked the car where the road ends, and walked until they couldn’t take any more. We stopped, had a bite to eat and drank some coffee, and then we hiked back. They had grown up in Malmö, unused to mountains and waterfalls, yet they took it all as a matter of course, although there was also something inadequate and helpless about them as they stood beneath the immensity of the mountains and the depth of the sky.
Linda began to feel depressed again, she talked less and less, by the time we visited Jon Olav and Liv at the end of the holiday she was hardly speaking. On the way home to Malmö we dropped in on my old friend Ole and his girlfriend Brita i
n Bergen, I hadn’t seen them since I moved to Sweden, the only thing to detract from the joy of talking to Ole again was that Linda was feeling low. But she was still a long way from how she had been. A few hours before the plane was due to depart I called for a taxi and the woman on the switchboard inquired whether I was Knausgaard, the author. I said I was and hated myself for it. The taxi was a minibus, which the children considered exciting, having it all to ourselves. At Flesland Airport people looked at me, some came over to say something about my books. One of them, a woman in her late fifties, said she ’d been to all the places I had described in Sørland.
“How big Vanja and Heidi are!” she said, and laughed.
“Yes,” I said.
“But I won’t pester you anymore. Have a good journey home. I suppose you’re going to Malmö, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Bye,” I said with a smile.
Vanja looked up at me.
“Do you know her, Dad?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Never seen her before.”
“But how did she know who we were?” she said.
“I’ve written a book about us,” I said.
“You’ve written a book about us?” she said.
“Yes.”
“What’s in it?”
“All sorts of strange things,” I said. “You’ll have to read it when you’re older.”
We passed through security, people stared at us. Once through, we went to a Narvesen kiosk to buy the children something for the flight. My face was everywhere. On the new paperbacks, which I hadn’t seen, Thomas’s photo of my face was on the cover.
“Dad, that’s you!” Heidi said, pointing.
“Oh it is. What do you know,” I said.
* * *
Once home, I got back to work. Vanja would be starting school in a few weeks and had been given permission to attend the nursery school until then. We had promised her she would have her own room when she started school and as the only extra room we had was my study, I’d moved my desk and all my books into a living room. That was as far as I’d got. The room had to be painted, a desk, bed, and wardrobe needed to be bought, as well as pictures she could hang on the wall. The plan was to paint one weekend and then go to IKEA the next. Vanja was nervous it wouldn’t be ready, but I assured her that everything would be ready the night before she started.
Linda’s depression lifted after a few days and everything was as usual at home. She said she would take the children to school and pick them up so that I could work straight through. I was happy about that. I got up at six in the morning, went right to the living room, closed the doors, and knuckled down, barely hearing the others getting up and leaving, I surfaced to say hi to them when they returned, ate with them, and worked until ten.
Linda had a friend from Stockholm staying, they had known each other for fifteen years or so, from when Linda worked at the Stadsteater in Stockholm. Her friend was a stage director and had recently made a short film from a script Linda had written. She had her one-year-old son with her and they planned to stay for a week. Locked in the living room from morning till night, I hardly saw them. An autumn publication was still a possibility if I hit the deadline.
“She’s absolutely fantastic,” Linda said about her friend one evening when we had a few minutes alone. “She gets stuff done. When she decides to do something, it always happens. That’s the exact opposite of me. But we can help each other. We’ve already come up with lots of ideas. It’s wonderful having her here.”
“I’m so pleased,” I said.
“And you can work as much as you like at the same time,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re generous to me. Don’t you go thinking I don’t realize that.”
* * *
One afternoon, on my way to check my e-mails in the bedroom, I met them in the hall, they had been out shopping.
“They were all on sale,” Linda said. “And I didn’t buy a lot.”
“Relax,” I said. “I didn’t say a word.”
“When I’m with her,” she said, nodding toward her friend, “I feel totally secure. She knows me so well. She knows exactly where the limits are, what’s good or bad for me.”
Her friend smiled.
“Linda charms the pants off all the shop assistants. Once I had to leave the shop, I was so embarrassed,” she said.
Linda laughed.
“Was that why you left? Really?” she said, and looked at me. “Nothing expensive, nothing over the top. Would you like to see?”
“No, I can take a look later,” I said, and went into my study.
The place was a mess again, the living-room floor was almost totally covered with toys, clothes, and towels, the same was true of the children’s room and the hall. Of course I couldn’t say anything, it was my responsibility as well, and normally I would have thought the mess can stay where it is until we have a blitz, because I had to work, I couldn’t waste even a couple of hours, but when we had visitors it was different, I was ashamed of the way we lived.
I said so to Linda.
“Don’t give her a thought,” she said. “She’s used to mess. It doesn’t bother her at all. And we’re working too. We have lots of plans. And they will come to fruition. She always achieves what she sets out to do. She’s so good for me.”
There was a tone she had that always emerged when she was on a high, but which in some way or other was more obvious now. A breezy, noncommittal tone, which brought with it an infantile side, not much, just a touch, but enough for me to find it irritating, for at these moments I wasn’t in communication with her, we were not operating from the same base. Sometimes I told her, then she just smiled and said she understood what I meant and she would try to be more present. When she was growing up she always had an element of the adult child in her, the child who saw through adults and retained her composure amid their chaotic lives, I’d gathered from what she told me, but especially from what she had written, where the adult child was a recurring figure. Now she was an adult, and it was as though the opposite was happening: she wasn’t assuming an adult role as a child but a child’s role as an adult. Oh, it wasn’t so much in evidence, only a tiny, tiny bit, something in her had stopped caring about any consequences, was no longer so careful about what was said, whether it was true or not, small dislocations of reality to make her appear funnier, grander, more entertaining. If she said something in front of the children that they shouldn’t know or hear and I reproved her, she immediately corrected herself: Dad’s right, that was silly of me.
I hadn’t been aware of this element in her personality, I had never seen it until this spring, it suddenly emerged and it wasn’t good for us because then I had to assume a role toward her, I became the person who corrected and set limits, and that was the last thing on this earth I wanted to do. There could be days, perhaps a week, when she was as light as light itself, and then it was gone from her character, like a comet leaving the firmament. Then she became “normal” again, then she became “Linda.” It was easier to relate to the periods when she sank into the darkness because it didn’t touch the person she was, we could communicate even though she was depressed. She was distraught that this was how she was, continually being raised to the heights and dumped back down, it made it almost impossible for her to work, for example, and forced her to go to places she didn’t want to be.
I was, like Linda, pleased that she had her friend staying, she was a few years older than me, I imagined, and a responsible adult who really liked Linda and had seen enough in her life to appreciate the unusual qualities she possessed. In all the mess they had a really good time, I heard them chatting and laughing together, discussing and planning. Linda did everything with the children, trying to make up for the time when she had been so depressed she hadn’t been able to do anything, I supposed.
Some slightly disturbing incidents took place. Twice Linda talked about me to her friend, she didn’t know I was within earshot and would never ha
ve said what she did otherwise, the tone was confidential and the confidences were addressed to her friend not to me. Above all else I hated other people talking about me, so that was unpleasant in itself, but it wasn’t disturbing. The disturbing element was that she didn’t know I could hear. The first time was in the hall outside our bedroom while I was in bed on the other side of the door, actually she knew that, how could she possibly have said something in secret about me in a loud voice three meters away from where I was? The second time was similar, they went to the balcony, I was in the second living room, I heard Linda tell her friend in a loud voice to leave everything where it was, it was Karl Ove’s problem. It didn’t matter that she said that, it mattered that she said it as if they were completely alone. She had begun to ignore the consequences of her actions.
The next morning, when I was working in one of the living rooms, I suddenly heard a din in the other. Linda had put on a record. It was a quarter to six, and she had turned the volume up loud. “Forever Young,” the old eighties hit, she was playing it at full blast at an unearthly hour.
I ran out to the stereo and turned it off.
“What are you doing? Do you know what time it is?”
She looked at me.
“Almost six. Relax. It wasn’t on that loud.”
She looked at me as though she were a teenager and I were the most narrow-minded middle-class parent she had ever seen. And perhaps she was right about that.
“Why are you up so early anyway? Didn’t you go to bed late last night?”
“Yes. I couldn’t sleep. I have so much on my mind. There are a few projects I’ve started. And you get angry when I lie awake and toss and turn, and then the children come in and want a glass of water or to sleep with us.”
“I don’t get angry. I’m asleep.”
“You sleep through everything. I don’t. And then you go to the kitchen to eat in the middle of the night and slam doors.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 127
